As originally written and published on Data Center POST

logo-newINCOMPAS™, formerly known as COMPTEL, recently held a CEO panel discussion at its Fall Business Expo in San Francisco, which brought together more than 1,500 attendees for four days of education and deal-making., Chip Pickering, the panel moderator and organization’s Chief Executive Officer, welcomed Randy Brouckman, CEO of EdgeConneX®, who joined Chris Ancell of XO Communications, and Laura Thomas of TNCI, to share insights on the future of competition in the data center, Over-the-Top (OTT), cloud, Unified Communications (UC), and networking subsectors. 

“We were fortunate to see a little before it happened, the fact that Over-the-Top wasn’t a fad, but that it would truly change the way people consumed everything,” Mr. Brouckman said, in describing the origin of EdgeConneX’s vision. He pointed to the marketplace demands of the ecosystem and, in particular, “The Internet of Everything which requires the Internet of Everywhere,” that is responsible for his company’s aggressive expansion. In fact, between July 2013 and August 2015, EdgeConneX built 23 Edge Data Centers® that are now live in the U.S. That speed-of-light pace is approximately one facility per month.

EdgeConneXHowever, as Brouckman pointed out, a few short years ago no one anticipated just how much traffic the surge in video and OTT content would yield, and how much content would be consumed. No one, perhaps, except Netflix. Today, industry observers predict that traffic will only increase in the years to come. We are on the verge of a yottabyte of data traversing our networks by 2030. A yottabyte, for those unfamiliar with the metric, is one septillion bytes. To put that in perspective, to store a yottabyte of data you would need a data center as big as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, and at the cost of a cool $100 trillion.

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